Art

I was finishing a late-aborning BA when a professor introduced me to the works of David Wojnarowicz. No doubt she fathomed that he could be a model for the writing I was attempting—autobiography of a frank, sexual nature that also had very much to do with loss and the times in which I came of…

A few hours or so spent in the company of a great film is akin to falling in love. A spell is cast; like a lover, the images on screen evoke a flipbook of feelings. That was what it was like to experience a Jonathan Demme film. I won’t soon forget the unbeatable elation I felt…

How apt that the red barn on top of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is called Transitional Object. It’s a term psychologists use to describe that which weans us away from, while providing the comfort of the original—think pacifier, though such objects might also be defined as props used to test reality. Could the same…

Want to know what it’s like to live inside a dream? The installation art of Do Ho Suh provides a lovely metaphor for the ways we carry our notions of home and hearth, and how a place, or even a country, imprints until it becomes part of us. Suh recreates these totems most strikingly in…

Tough times for Folkies Dept: First she fended off Taylor Swift’s attempt to make a movie of her life. Now comes word that Joni Mitchell was hospitalized this week. The prospect of losing the ultimate artist is too dispiriting to contemplate. We love you, Joni–now get up and get back to work.

There’s a certain slant of light, Winter afternoons— That oppresses, like the heft Of cathedral tunes Emily Dickinson Winter is the cruelest season, though for me it’s not so much about the cold (though we’ve had our chilly moments, this time of year our apartment often feels like summer). What kills me is the darkness. …

That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, William Shakespeare, Sonnet 73 Don’t’ be fooled by those guys still wearing flip-flops, or the young (and not so) women who continue to stroll our avenues in their Daisy…

Some are born to leave their mark. Lately we’ve lost so many who have that late summer feels a touch more autumnal; now we have to get used to life without Eydie Gorme, Elmore Leonard, Dennis Farina, Emile Griffith, Walter DeMaria, Virginia E. Johnson, Esther Williams, James Gandolfini, and Michael Ansara, not to mention Helen…

Best Saturday ever: first, Ann Hamilton’s installation at the Park Avenue Armory, then the George Bellows retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Ann’s from Lima, OH; Bellows hails from Columbus. As a Cincinnatian, nice to know that our state’s renown extends beyond it being a swing state, and a conservative bastion. If either work…